


Carelessly Growing Up and Growing Old

by heartofthesunrise



Series: Summer of Like [2]
Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Black Clouds and Underdogs tour, Early Mornings, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-28
Updated: 2016-11-28
Packaged: 2018-09-02 18:06:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8677579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartofthesunrise/pseuds/heartofthesunrise
Summary: Honeymoon periods never lasted forever, did they? 
-
A six month timestamp from Summer of Like, something I've been wanting to write for a while. And who better to motivate me to do it than patroh queen rosiedoesfic Happy belated birthday, you wonderful pal!





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rosiedoesfic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosiedoesfic/gifts).



> Title ganked from "We Intertwined" by the Hush Sound, which also inspired the general mood for the fic.

**Monday 3/20/06: Somewhere on the road to Grand Rapids, MI**

 

It had finally happened. Joe was sprawled out in his bunk thinking about it all, what this meant, how it changed things. 

After six months of false starts and excuses, Pete and Andy were quantifiably…  _ together.  _ It was a title deserving of italicization due to the sheer volume of it - even with his headphones on Joe could hear them, right at this moment, sloppily making out and laughing on the couch up at the front of the bus. 

He turned his music up a little.

He had nothing to be bitter about. In fact, he had every reason to be glad, because if anyone in the world deserved to have exactly what they wanted it was Andy Hurley, especially given how long it had taken for him to get there. And yeah, Pete was insufferable when he was in love, but he was worse when he was out of it, and if Joe was gonna be - as he was coming to realize - stuck with an insufferable Pete probably for the rest of his life, this was the lesser of two evils. They couldn’t keep up this level of athletic necking for too long, right?

Honeymoon periods never lasted forever, did they?

He rolled onto his side and twitched the bunk curtain back so he could see Patrick, across the aisle, elbow deep in the  _ Like Vines  _ rough cuts. Patrick was working himself to the bone these days, between the tour and the Hush Sound record and Travie’s project, which was turning into a full-blown  _ thing.  _ Joe entertained the notion that the churning feeling in his stomach was about Patrick overexerting himself and not some sort of misguided jealousy, but he knew himself better than that.

Across from him, he saw Patrick look up at his bunk ceiling, the way his lips twitched while he counted beats, the adamant tap of his fingers on the trackpad of his laptop. Patrick noticed him looking and paused the playback, pulled his headphones down, and turned to smile at him.

“Hey, you,” he said.

Joe shuffled forward toward the edge of his bunk so his whole face was peeking out from the gap in the curtain. “Hi.”

“Bored?”

Joe nodded. He felt really goddamn childish all of a sudden, especially watching Patrick go through the meticulous motions of saving his tracks, shutting GarageBand down, stowing his laptop away in its pocket. Patrick slid down from his bunk and pulled the curtain aside in Joe’s, leaning in to peck him on the mouth before clambering up beside him.

“Get a room!” Pete called from the front lounge, and he sounded muffled, probably by some part of Andy. Gross.

They were still comically bad at sharing a bunk. Patrick squirmed around trying to be mindful of his elbows, pressing Joe back against the bunk wall, and they both had to shift and settle for the next half a minute just to find a workable position to cuddle. They wound up with Joe on his side, one arm stretched out underneath Patrick’s neck, the rest of him curled around Patrick, who was flat on his back. Joe sighed, consigned the arm under Patrick to its inevitable pins and needles, and bent to kiss Patrick sleepily on the temple.

Patrick yawned into Joe’s face. He smelled strongly of potato chips and Thai food. They were only a few days into this tour but it felt like so much of their lives, their life, was spent on the road. The UK before this, and the Nintendo Fusion Tour before that, and… That glittering month off, between Warped and NFT, when the autumn breeze off the lake back home had still been warm and he and Patrick had still been entirely wrapped up in one another.

He was romanticizing it. He shook himself, just a little, to dislodge the nostalgia he told himself he didn’t want, and Patrick glanced at him and laughed a little.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Joe said. “Just thinkin’.” He should just say it. He was always underestimating Patrick’s capacity for understanding. “You’ve been busy.”

Patrick nodded. “I have,” he agreed.

“Is that, like…” What a lame question. God. “Are you happy?” He hoped it didn’t come out like an accusation, but he knew it must have, a little bit.

Patrick turned around so they were nearly nose to nose. With the curtain drawn and the light off, he was little more than an abstract shape, a row of hills and valleys under the blankets. As he often was, Joe was arrested by Patrick’s intensity, even without being able to see him.

“Are you not?” he asked.

That was the question, wasn’t it.

He wasn’t unhappy. They were playing stadiums, they were handily selling out the same enormous venues that, months before, they’d trundled through as just one attraction on the Warped Tour. The shows were incredible. The little bits and pieces of writing that were beginning between Pete and Patrick were already asserting themselves, were on another level. Joe was the shredding lead guitarist of an important rock band, was in love with one of his best friends, had watched this whole unlikely thing come together with awe and stood in wonder at its majesty every day.

And yet.

“No, I am,” he said finally. It wasn’t a lie, or, it wasn’t entirely a lie, anyway. “Just miss you sometimes.”

Even in the darkness he could see the edge of Patrick’s cheek, limned in the barest light coming through the crack in the curtain, and the way it rounded out when he smiled.

It grew quiet between them, and under the rumble and roll of the bus Joe could hear the soft murmur of Pete and Andy up front. Mostly Pete. He sounded happy, he sounded  _ excited,  _ and Joe couldn’t even find it within himself to be annoyed in that moment. This time last year, Pete had been playing his first shows back with them after they’d been forced to go to England without him. They’d had no record, and very little hope; they’d had nothing but their determination. Funny how so much could happen so quickly.

Now Pete was reaching what appeared to be some sort of apex, with his Andy thing finally coalescing the way they’d been waiting for it to. Panic was finishing up a tour just as they were starting theirs, opening for the Academy after they’d both released records on Pete’s label, to undisputed success. Pete was like a proud dad, calling to check in with them every few days, making intelligent comments, proving that he knew what he was talking about. And he was bursting with creativity. He was ganking old lines from his blog posts over that fateful summer and smelting them into something better, songs that were embryonic but so promising already.

Joe tried not to think about how on the other side of a rise to glory there was usually a fall from grace. 

 

*

 

He didn’t even realize he’d fallen asleep until he was waking up. Patrick wasn’t beside him anymore, though that could hardly be helped - they kept such incompatible sleeping patterns that more often than not Patrick would climb out of his bunk after an hour or two and wander off to putter around the bus until the wee hours, working on music or watching TV with the volume down. 

The bus had stopped, Joe realized. The clock on the front of his phone told him it was a little past four in the morning, still plenty of wintry dark to weather before dawn. But he was inexplicably and entirely awake.

A cursory trip into the front lounge told him they weren’t yet in Grand Rapids; they were at a truckstop, with dark, snow-lined highway out beyond them and a Bridge Mart like a beacon, a riot of light against the blanket of night sky. Joe pulled on a pair of sneakers and the heaviest coat he could find over his pajamas.

The Bridge Mart was empty except for a bored-looking checkout girl at the counter, her elbows propped up next to a glass case of unappetizing hot dogs under a heat lamp. She was reading a magazine, and she nodded to him when he entered, but didn’t look up.

Joe walked down the furthest aisle from the girl. To his right, a row of refrigerator cases full of soda and iced tea and cases of piss-cheap beer. To his left, shelves of off-brand chips and packages full of beef jerky and ranch flavored corn nuts, boxes of poptarts, nothing that looked remotely tempting, nor all that different from the food they had on the bus. He reached the back of the store and was making himself a cup of coffee with an obnoxious amount of cream and sugar when he heard the bell over the front door jangle.

“Troh!”

Pete.

Joe put the lid on his coffee and turned around to find Pete weaving through the aisles towards him, drowning in a parka that didn’t belong to him, grinning in his strange, early morning way.

“Morning, Pete,” Joe said. He couldn’t quite muster the energy. Pete didn’t seem to mind.

“Have you looked around?” he asked. “What’s the frozen food situation? I’m gonna puke if I eat another hot pocket and Andy won’t share his stuff.”

Joe gestured back towards the refrigerators. “Slim pickins, but have at it. Maybe I missed something.”

Pete emerged a minute later with an armload of frozen waffles and a big bottle of orange juice. “Grab me a syrup,” he said to Joe as they passed by a sad display of condiments.

The checkout girl stared at them when Pete dumped all the waffles on the counter in front of her. She looked down at her magazine, then back up at the two of them. “Pete Wentz?” she asked, finally, and Joe watched Pete shift seamlessly into his famous self. He put all the waffles on his credit card and signed the girl's magazine, a Rolling Stone with a little profile on their current tour. Like an afterthought, she proffered the Sharpie to Joe and he signed next to his ink smudged face. The girl was blowing on their signatures, bored again and getting the ink to dry, while Joe dug around in his pocket for two dollars for the coffee.

"Keep the change," he said, because Pete was already tumbling out the front doors and letting in a blast of frigid air. He cupped both hands around his coffee and caught up with Pete at a jog.

Aside from a couple crew guys, nobody else was up.

"Brunch?" Pete asked, waving one of the boxes of waffles. He didn't wait for Joe to respond before filling the toaster. "Been a while since you and me had a soul jam."

Joe nodded. This was Pete, surreal fucking Pete, exactly the same as he always had been. He set down a pair of solo cups in front of Joe, along with the orange juice and the bottle of syrup, and then tossed down a box of assorted plastic cutlery.

The waffles actually smelled pretty fucking good when Pete had them stacked up, steaming, on a paper plate. He gestured to them and Joe took two and drenched them in syrup. He was surprised to find that this was... What he needed, in some measure. Sometimes Pete was weirdly good at that.

"You okay, Troh?" Pete asked. "You've been, y'know." He paused and shoveled a forkful of waffle into his mouth. Syrup dripped over the pout of his bottom lip. Gross. "Thinky, lately."

"I guess I am, dude," Joe said. He was puddling syrup in the individual wells offered to him by the waffle's surface, like the exact kind of head case he was. He saw Pete watching him and cut it out immediately.

"You and Ric are good, right?" Pete asked.

Was it that transparent? Was there actually something wrong?

"Yeah, we're good, man. I just. I dunno, it's hard. Right?"

Pete chewed thoughtfully and when he swallowed Joe saw his adam's apple bob in his throat. "I guess so. I mean. What's hard?" He raised his eyebrows. "I can think of  _ a couple _ things that might be hard -"

Joe kicked him good naturedly under the table. They'd gotten over that roadblock eventually, the two of them and some strategic googling and a strangely educational porno that Joe found online. They were, he liked to think, pretty good at it now.

"Not that," he said. "Like. Well, I mean, you and Andy. You see each other all the time, right? Doesn't it sometimes feel like... I mean, like you're just you? And he's just Andy?"

"Dude we've only been sucking face for like three days, the novelty hasn't worn off."

"Firstly, gross, secondly, yeah, but he's still... I mean you were in Racetraitor together."

Pete laughed, and a little piece of half-chewed waffle flew out of his mouth and landed on the formica tabletop between them. "Yeah, but like... Okay, look at it this way. You and Patrick did that dance around the obvious all summer long and it still felt, y'know, new when it finally happened right?"

"Yeah." New and overwhelming, and perfect. Joe's eyes drifted out the window to the highway rattling along past them.

"So you're bummed out that it's not like that now, is what you're saying." It wasn't a question. Pete usually knew when he was right, even if it didn't happen as often as he wished it would.

"No, I know that like... Forget it, nothing's wrong."

"Come on, dude, talk to me. I'm your big brother, or whatever. I'm happy and in love and I want to share the fruits of my wisdom."

"You mean you've been -" Joe made air quotes. "Sucking face for three days?"

Pete scoffed. "We're soulmates and it's been like ten years."

"You want to help me, Pete, you gotta be serious." Joe pushed his cut up waffles around the plate. "Just... What happens next?"

Instead of answering, Pete poured himself a full cup of orange juice and drank it, his brows furrowed, like he was thinking really hard. "Y'know? I don't know that I ever got to the place where I was comfortable enough with like... Anyone. To get out of the part of the relationship where you're constantly just worrying that they're gonna leave your ass. How sad is that?"

"Pretty sad," Joe agreed, and Pete reached across the table to slug him fraternally on the shoulder.

"No, I just mean like... You're seeing it as boring, or as like, worrying that you're not attached at the mouth right now, but you could also try seeing that as, I dunno, like kind of a blessing?" Pete turned the empty solo cup over in his hands. "Like you're just happy to be together and you feel good about it and it doesn't need to have all this, like, drama." He looked up. "But what's life without drama?"

"Anyone ever tell you you've got a fucked up life philosophy?" Joe asked. But he was feeling, you know, a little better. All things considered.

"Hurley, yeah," Pete said. "Why do you think I'm so into him?"

Joe grimaced. He was happy for them, sure, but it was a little bit like the time he heard his mom call his dad sexy. Gross.

"All I'm saying," Pete continued, "Is that like. Next is... The rest of your life. If you want it to be. I dunno, maybe you move in together, maybe you get married, go full Brangelina and adopt some orphan kids. Just like. This is your life now. That's what's next, dude."

"Oh." _Oh._

"Yeah, oh."

They spent a little more time eating, finishing off the rest of the stack of waffles and talking instead about gigs, about Pete's plans for the label, about the sorts of sounds they were all looking at for the new album. A new album. It didn't seem that far back that they were tracking _From Under the Cork Tree,_ but it was a lifetime, anyway.

Eventually Joe stood up, folded his paper plate up and crammed it into the already overfull trashcan. He was pretty ready to go back to sleep, but he paused before the entrance to the bunks. "Hey Pete?" he asked.

Pete looked up from where he was making patterns with his fork in the leftover syrup on his plate. "Yeah?"

"Thanks, dude," Joe said.

"Anytime."

 

*

 

The next morning Joe pinballed around the bus for a while. They were in Grand Rapids, not that that meant much to him. He'd slept late but Patrick wouldn't get up until after noon, and he was feeling a little sentimental after his conversation with Pete. Pete, who'd miraculously developed the ability to pull his head out of his own ass in the last couple weeks. Maybe that was Andy's influence.

It was definitely Andy's influence.

If it were Joe asleep he wouldn't mind Patrick waking him up to come cuddle with him, but a half-asleep Patrick was a dangerous creature with a pair of surprisingly sharp elbows, so he let himself off the bus instead and wandered the venue, the long, echoing concrete corridors that were the same in every stadium in every city no matter where they went. His breath fogged in front of him, an unsubtle reminder that while spring may be here, it was in name only. He found his way to their green rooms and was surprised to find them occupied, but barely.

Greta Salpeter was curled up on one lumpy sofa with an algebra textbook spread out in front of her and a notebook in her lap. Fuck, he forgot how young she was.

"High school?" he asked lamely, and she looked up, startled. "Sorry, didn't mean to scare you."

"No, no, you're fine," she said. There was something just a little bit unsettling about the way she talked; it was the sort of cadence you'd expect out of somebody twenty years older than her. "I can't really work on the bus, I get motion sick."

"Bummer."

Joe looked over her shoulder and confirmed what he suspected already, that any mathematical ability he'd temporarily retained to graduate three years ago had fled him immediately. "Pete's like, not bad at math," he offered.

Greta laughed. "That's okay, I think I'll take my chances." She copied a complicated looking graph off the screen of her calculator into her notebook.

"I'll, uh, leave you to it, then," he said, and did.

It was very strange to think that because he knew Pete - or, more precisely, because he'd once spent a summer driving Pete around when his license had gotten suspended - his life had come to include things like pulling teenagers with angelic voices out of their high school classes and making stars of them. Should they be doing something more? Had they gotten her parents to sign a permission slip? Did they know all her allergies?

Joe felt very responsible, just then, even though he wasn't. That, he guessed, must mean he was officially an adult.

He wandered back through the maze of hallways to the chilly garage where their buses were parked, and climbed aboard, and was very pleased to find Patrick begrudgingly awake at the kitchen table. He was in what Joe knew was his biggest, warmest hoodie, with a mug of coffee cradled between his palms. He looked like he was spacing out. Maybe he was sleeping with his eyes open.

"Hey dude," Joe said. He slid into the seat across from Patrick, where Pete had been sitting earlier that morning. The table was still vaguely sticky with drops of clumsily poured syrup. Joe leaned forward to collect a kiss from Patrick. He was pleased, in some obscure part of himself, that kissing Patrick good morning still felt a little bit novel.

"Hey yourself," Patrick said around a yawn. He wasn't wearing his glasses, but even as Joe realized it he saw Patrick fish them out of his hoodie pocket and put them on, definitely smudging them in the process. He didn't seem to mind.

"Hey can I run something by you?" Joe asked. This new, strange, adult feeling had bolstered him with a surge of courage.

Patrick nodded and smiled at him, and Joe remembered that he loved him very much. That Patrick loved him, in turn.

"Y'know how we have those two months off?" he asked.

"Yeah...?" Patrick was looking at him, suspicious but not displeased.

"Well I was thinking maybe we could like, take a week. Go on a trip." Joe drummed his fingers on the edge of the table and then drew them sharply away when he felt the syrup residue there. "I dunno where, yet, I was thinking we'd figure that out together, but like... I mean, we travel all the time but we're always working. So."

While he'd been speaking, Patrick's curious smile had grown wide, Cheshire-esque. At this point it was downright goofy. 

"Yeah, dude," he said, and leaned up to kiss Joe again. "That sounds great."

Just then the distinct noise of Andy and Pete tumbling out of one bunk and then opening and closing the door to the back lounge made itself known, and Joe couldn't help but laugh. The honeymoon period? Good, wonderful, well-deserved by his best friends. This? Being an adult, being with Patrick, holding his hand across the table and being sure of exactly how they felt about each other?

Joe wouldn't trade that for the world.


End file.
